6 Main Reasons Why Visitors Leave Site Instantly
The bounce rate is one of the most important metrics for any site. It shows what percentage of visitors leave your site after viewing only one page or within the first 10 seconds (the exact definition depends on the web analytics tool you use).
The higher the bounce rate, the more potential customers you lose. Bounced visitors believe that your site has nothing to offer them and leave without any interaction. Reduced concentration of attention in people and a huge number of competitors on the network lead to the fact that your potential customers have very little incentive to actively explore the site.
Visitors are unlikely to independently study your suggestions and what benefits they can bring in everyday life. Thus, the first page that a person lands on should convince him that the site deserves attention.
Bounce rate optimization is extremely important for any business. Visitors can instantly leave your site for a variety of reasons.
Here are the most likely ones:
- Inconsistency of expectations. Your visitors expect to see something on your site, but the page lacks the information they need. This happens quite often, especially when you paid for advertising a certain offer, but tied it to a common page, for example, to the main page. It is important to meet the expectations of visitors. Your site may have a huge amount of information, but a potential client visits it to learn more about a specific offer from your ad.
- Irrelevant organic issue. Although search engines every day begin to better select the appropriate content for user queries, they are still not perfect. When you studied web analytics reports, you were probably surprised at the inappropriate phrases that people used to find your site. Your visitors experienced similar feelings. Try comparing the bounce rate for organic traffic (people who went to the site from search engines) with inorganic (those who came from other sources). You will definitely find that the first indicator is higher than the second.
- Your site is bad. Opening the page, visitors expect to see beautiful design and user-friendly interface. People are tired of poorly made websites filled with advertising. If your resource is no better, visitors will not be happy. Make them a pleasant surprise and create a website with the right contrast, typography, layout, and color scheme. Hire a first-class designer and pay him as much as you can – the main thing is that the site looks good.
- Lack of call to action. This may be the only reason visitors bounce off the site. Once visitors are on your page, let them know what to do next. Lead them to the actions that you consider optimal for this page. If this is a blog, ask them to subscribe for updates. If this is a corporate website, invite users to read case studies and technical documents. In short, don’t make people think too long about what they should do. Guide them carefully with calls to action located in suitable and visible areas of the page. Basically, these are the places where the visitor has just achieved his original goal (the one for which he went to the site) and decides what to do next.
- Too much choice. This problem is directly opposed to the previous paragraph on landing pages without a call to action. Do not give the visitor too much freedom of choice; this can also lead to an increase in the bounce rate. Partly for this reason, people can instantly leave your home page more often than internal ones. Too many links or calls to action scatter visitors. They can cause person anxiety and lead to the fact that he simply leaves the site and tries to find an alternative. Experienced conversion optimization firms (such as Wingify) and good web designers who can create an effective layout with different calls to action for different types of visitors will help solve this problem, which will reduce the bounce rate.
HOW TO REDUCE THE BOUNCE RATE?
Because different websites are designed for different purposes and serve different audiences, there is no universal way to minimize the bounce rate.
However, you can follow these general guidelines to reduce your lost potential customers:
- Examine the bounce rates for each landing page and login page individually. The overall failure rate of the site does not contain absolutely any useful information since this is a vague and inaccurate value. The best way to get reliable data is to examine the landing pages individually. Using the web analytics tool, determine the 20 most popular landing pages on the site and individual bounce rates for each of them. You will probably be surprised to find how much the values on different pages differ. Your main goal should be to optimize the most visited landing pages/categories with the highest bounce rates.
- Polls. There are many tools on the Internet that allow you to conduct surveys among visitors who are about to leave the site prematurely. I am wary of such methods since they upset already displeased people. However, polls may be useful for your site.
- Heatmaps and travel routes. You can use tools like Clicktale to track mouse movements, clicks, scrolling depths, and keystrokes for site visitors. In this way, you can determine what exactly they do when they reach the landing pages. An analysis of the actions of visitors will allow you to find out very important things, for example, whether they notice the Signup button on the side panel. Alternatively, you can use tools like Crazyegg to study heatmaps. Find out exactly which sections of the page attract visitors the most and use the information received to optimize.
- Testing. Typically, the only way to evaluate page performance is to test it. You must conduct split tests to test in practice various designs, layouts, styles, calls to action, etc. You can use the services of digital marketing agencies. Test regularly to constantly reduce your site’s bounce rate.
According to Digital Growth World an #1 A Digital Marketing Training Institute, in Varanasi, the only good bounce rate is the one that decreases every month. Therefore, efforts to optimize the site should primarily focus on improving this particular metric.
Also Read: WordPress Optimization, 2020 Simple Tips.
What strategies do you use to reduce your bounce rate? Are you putting enough effort into reducing the number of lost potential customers? Are you satisfied with your site’s bounce rate?
